Picks and Pans Review: Erica Wilson's Needlepoint

Here's a fresh crop of creative canvases for serious needlepointers. Stitching charts are easy to follow, and design sources are impeccable in each of these lushly photographed volumes. Russell's patterns for pillows and wall hangings, adaptable to smaller projects like frames and bookmarks, are modeled after the decorative work of William Morris, a founder of the 19th-century arts-and-crafts movement in her native England. Wilson works on a slightly larger scale, offering an appealing array of large pillows and small rugs inspired by textiles in the collections of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art (Crown $30; Abrams $29 95)